“I built a user flow in a PowerPoint deck and showed people. When that got a good response, I built a working prototype using a free tool and showed people. These days you can pretty much validate your product vision with a free prototyping tool, and better yet even mock advanced features that would take you 6 months to actually build and see if people get “wowed”.”

Before writing a line of code — or for us non-technical folk, finding someone to write the code, you can do a lot of the legwork in validating that people actually want your product.

Sidenote: Launch before you’re ready

“If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late” — Reid Hoffman

You can keep a product under wraps for months, even years, until you think it’s ready to launch. But without any real-world usage it’s hard to know how your product will be received and who will use it.

A great byproduct of being a non-technical founder is that you often have little choice but to launch something that’s not quite ready. This opens up a ton of opportunity to learn about your market.

2. Network

Great co-founders aren’t sat around waiting to help you bring ideas to life and your potential customers aren’t sat around waiting for your product to be built. You need to get out there and network: speak with people, join Twitter chat, go to Meetups.

Whether you’re looking to find a co-founder or find your first customer, in order to be successful, you have to first put yourself in the right places to meet the right people.

3. Make the most of your skills

You might not have the skills to build your website, but that doesn’t mean your skills are useless in the early stages of your startup journey.

Non-technical skills are just as important as technical in a startup. While you can’t write the code, there are a myriad of ways you can start getting your startup off the ground.

“What it takes to create a successful product is eliminating all the unvalidated aspects, and finding something that users or customers truly want, that has product/market fit and can get traction. The interesting part about this, is that coding is actually not at all required to achieve this.”

I first launched Nudge as a one page site a friend of mine built in a couple of hours. This version was enough to generate sign ups (initially just a Campaign Monitor mailing list).

Once I had these email addresses of people who were interested in Nudge I was able to speak with them to find out what piqued their interest and how they’d like to use a product like Nudge for their business.

These learnings were invaluable when it came to building our MVP.

4. Share your story

Start a blog, podcast, vlog. Choose whatever medium you’re most comfortable with and start sharing your story with the world as you build.

Many successful startups were created as blog first startups, including Groupon, Mattermark, and Moz. These startups were able to build a loyal audience of early adopters before building out their products.

Focus your content around your startup’s pain points and you’ll quickly be able to find out who cares about what you’re building. If people start sharing your posts, leaving comments and signing up with email then they’re into what you’re doing and could even become your first customers.

NEXT POST

1 Comment →How to build a startup as a non-technical founder

Really interesting post, which expands well from what Joel mentioned. Thanks for sharing!

As a non-technical founder of a complex wearable hardware startup, this theme definitely resonates. Saying that, agencies/consultancies definitely play a valuable part in at least helping you to understand your system. For example. As a non-tecchie, I was able to have numerous meetings with some of the UK’s best design and development agencies. This helped me understand the system architecture and detailed process to batch production, which I could then regurgitate to others. This definitely makes you more credible to potential technical cofounders. Another trick. Networking is fine, but you need to stand apart from the noise. Hosting an event in your field helps to attract curious (usually technically minded) individuals, who at least will be curious about your background, and will want to understand your association to the subject.